Fringe theatre reviews: Come Back Home | Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella | Transmission: Into the Dark | Sarah McGuinness: Grit, Glamour and Gaslight | Mister Jackpot

THEATRE

Come Back Home ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

Art has been trying to articulate trauma for as long as it has existed – whether it is actually successful at doing so is another question. In Palestinian artist Fadi Murad’s impossible-to-categorise performance piece Come Back Home, the absurd nature of trying to coalesce grief, harm and despair into something coherent becomes the whole point. Come Back Home is less a show about the trauma that Murad has experienced – the death of his mother at a young age, the occupation of his homeland – than it is about whether language or performance can capture these ideas at all, or whether the illusion of narrative and meaning is just another form of oppression.

The play unfolds with a distinct dream logic, jerky and abrupt. Murad arrives on stage playing out a standoff with different versions of himself, in which he holds out his fingers like guns and darts across the Anatomy Lecture Theatre like a small child. He seemingly wets himself. He recites beautiful, unsettling poetry, changes costume as if attending a funeral and plays old home footage of himself as a child. In a way, Come Back Home is a palimpsest, in which different modes of expression, from soundscapes and video to sitar and clowning, sit over and bleed into each other seemingly at random. Yet there is nothing random about it: this is ultimately a show about fragmentation – fragmentation of the self through grief and occupation and collective suffering – and it is only through obscurity that Murad can come close to expressing the inexpressible.

There is a lot of theatre about Palestine in the Fringe programme: Come Back Home is striking for not mentioning Palestine directly. Yet how do we speak about unspeakable violence? How do we communicate something that ruptures all sense and meaning? Playful, eerie and surprising, Come Back Home is a séance for the memories – both personal and collective – that feel the most impossible to hold. Anahit Behrooz

THEATRE

Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella ★★★★

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 30 August

Linus Karp is known for Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story and Gwyneth Goes Skiing, and fans of his particular theatrical trade will not be disappointed. His new show, told from a set built like a pop-up storybook, recounts a homophobic attack he suffered in Soho just before Fringe 2024, in which his attacker threatened to kill him. The story leaps through time, and audio of the 999 call plays throughout, interweaving the attack and its aftermath with the origin story of Karp’s marriage, so that trauma and tenderness sit side-by-side.

He is hit over the head with a wooden umbrella, hard enough that the handle breaks. His then-boyfriend-now-husband, Joseph Martin, a British Transport Police officer, makes the call and restrains the attacker. Karp gives his statement in a room lit only by a plug-in floodlight, his head still throbbing, and is told by an officer that he was “just unlucky.” He admits he wishes the bruise were bigger, to match the trauma no one sees, and finds himself wanting someone, anyone, to collide with him, so he might have the opportunity to defend himself.

As with his earlier work, pop culture supplies the show’s shorthand: a Harry Potter shop provides a meet-cute, a children’s TV puppet delivers hate-crime statistics, while the audience reads aloud tweets from the screens that hang from either side of the stage. It’s a show that plays confidently to an audience already won over – Fringe regulars for whom Karp has become something of a fixture – and the steady stream of personal detail rewards that familiarity. When Karp’s attacker fails to show in court, this show stages the trial itself, with Karp presiding. What follows is justice without resolution, a reclaiming of years spent hypervigilant and afraid. Karp proposes “love goodness” as an alternative to “hate crime” – a small, delightful phrase that holds the heart of the production, where a horrific event unfolds with hope. Josephine Balfour-Oatts

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THEATRE

Transmission: Into the Dark ★★★★

Traverse Theatre (location provided on booking) (Venue 311) until 23 August

Melbourne-based artists, one step at a time like this, made their Fringe debut in Edinburgh in 2010 with En Route, an individual walking journey through the heart of the city. They return this year with a new walking experience, their first to take place at night.

Having been messaged the address of a secret location, you open a lock box and find a radio. “Just wander,” invites the soft voice of the late-night radio presenter. There is ambient music, night-time callers. Occasionally, the voice seems to address you directly.

I found my awareness immediately heightened. Everything starts to feel like it’s part of the show: the pianist practising in a ground floor living room, the man wearing a kilt who’s walking a dog. If you have a relationship with the city, memories and associations start to surface.

Transmission: Into the Dark is, in a sense, about the nature of night: what it feels like to wander, catching glimpses of other lives through lighted windows, how solitude is accentuated and introspection invited, and night’s association with death, the thinning of the veil between worlds.

There are also more specific instructions which guide you into certain experiences (reviewers are asked not to give spoilers). However, it’s worth saying that the instructions are always clear, and though you never see the company, help is always nearby if you need it.

A theatre audience can be passive, but a show like this invites - requires - participation, with the body and the imagination. You receive hints, prompts, questions, but the richness of your experience depends to some extent on how you approach it. In you come with an open mind, you are rewarded with an experience in a city at night which feels like it’s happening for you and you alone: a little bit of magic. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Sarah McGuinness: Grit, Glamour and Gaslight ★★★

Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) until 31 August

In a previous life Sarah McGuinness ran theatre companies, made documentaries, promoted comedians at the Fringe and felt like a passenger in her famous ex-partner’s life but now is her time to shine as the star of this likeable autobiographical cabaret which traces her childhood in Derry at the height of the Troubles via her non-starter of a music career and psychologically abusive manager to finally casting off decades of discouragement where her efforts to stand out were stamped down and attempts to disappear were met with mockery.

She pours a lifetime’s love of music into her performance choices. She celebrates the influence of David Bowie and Kate Bush not just in covering their songs or bossing their eccentric flamboyance but in her original composition Dragonfly, inspired by the childhood soundtrack of Chinook helicopters in the Derry skies. She takes refuge from those who bullied her for her Anglo-Irish heritage in the revenge drama of Weill and Brecht’s Pirate Jenny, makes peace with her past singing a beautiful a capella rendition of My Lagan Love and emerges on the other side of dire illness to deliver her own personal Bond theme, Strong, with an earthy glamour which suits her to her blood red fingertips. Fiona Shepherd

THEATRE

Mister Jackpot ★★

Teatro Fisico (Venue 359a) until 21 August

Anyone feeling lucky may wish to see Tom Corradini’s Mister Jackpot before they step foot in a casino.

The one-man physical theatre piece follows a regular American joe, played by Nike Redding, who works as a procurement manager at a gardening equipment company. His comfortably monotonous existence is quickly turned upside down when he becomes addicted to gambling.

Redding convincingly embodies the naive eagerness of a young middle-class American professional, complete with an Anglophile reverence for James Bond. He is commendably comfortable alone on the stage, defining his unseen surroundings through mime with ease. Corradini’s commitment to physical theatre, however, results in some overwhelming scenes of swaying and convulsing that punctuate the plot, as well as a confusing sequence involving a YouTube channel advising compulsive gamblers on how to make a quick buck.

Billed as a tragicomedy, the show definitely hits the tragi- far more squarely on the head. But it does make for a very persuasive anti-gambling advert. Lilia Foster

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